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Monday, February 22, 2010

Review: Download and Go Expedition Australia

So, here’s my second e-book to review for my try-out. We’re still in the process of using this, but I wanted to let everyone know what I thought so far.

This is from a series of books called Download ‘N’ Go. Each individual book costs $7.95, and has about 100 pages of information (or the Australia one does). I have to say I really enjoyed this book and of the two I was given to review I think this is a much better deal. I’m thinking some of these could be great for me to get for my kids in a few years. I like the Davy Crockett one I just got an email for in my in-box. He would be fun to study in a few years, especially when we cover United States history in more detail in a few years. Now be honest, how many of you when I said Davy Crockett got the theme song to the old Disney TV show stuck in your heads?

Here’s the set-up of the book it has two different things you can do. First it has a notebooking set you can go through and fill out with all sorts of great information and comparison between where you live and between different parts of Australia. It’s designed so you can go through and do a quick study of Australia in 5 days. And in five days you get a pretty good knowledge of it.

Each day you talk about a different geographic feature, a different animal, and each day also has a specific thing they talk about. For instance day one talks about how we say different words to mean the same thing. Another day you learn about Captain Cook.

While you go through and learn about these different things you construct both a notebook and a lapbook. I have to admit both of these are intended for kids much older than mine, so most of it they couldn’t do without a lot of help, but they enjoyed the activities that goes with this.

What did I like most? For me right now, I liked that they’d already researched all of the kid appropriate links for me and included some really interesting videos (I would have linked more videos, because I had problems when I started to look for videos of the other animals that didn’t have videos). That’s one of the harder things I think right now is finding links that are age appropriate without searching for hours.

In a few years my answer would change. I remember doing a country report in sixth grade and struggling to gather the material to present. This perfectly lays it out in a way a younger elementary student could do with help, and an older one could do by themselves. And both of those students would have a very impressive report that could win a prize if they took their time.